On this day in history, the African Americans who helped push Sherman’s army through the swamp territory during his famous March to the Sea were betrayed at Ebenezer Creek, only some twenty miles from the city of Savannah, Georgia.
One of Sherman’s brigadier generals, the ironically (but appropriately, it seems) named Jefferson C. Davis, commanded Sherman’s Fourteenth Corps. In spite of the fact that Black refugees who joined the march were supplying a great deal of the labor for making the sandy roads passable for the army, Davis wasn’t fond of them. He saw them as exacerbating the food shortage problem, and slowing down the march. He was also an unrepentant supporter of slavery.
Union Army Fourteenth Corps Commander Jefferson C. Davis
As the troops approached Ebenezer Creek, Davis issued instructions that the Black refugees remain behind until the Army had crossed the pontoon bridge. As soon as the Army and their workers were safely across, General Davis ordered his men to dismantle the bridge, trapping the refugees between the icy river and the oncoming Southerners. Colonel Charles D. Kerr of the 126th Illinois Cavalry, which was at the rear of the XIV Corps, wrote that orders were given not to let any negroes cross, and that a guard was detailed to enforce the order.
Major General Oliver O. Howard, commander of the right wing of Sherman’s army (which included Davis’s corps), recalled seeing “throngs of escaping slaves’ of all types, from the baby in arms to the old negro hobbling painfully along the line of march; negroes of all sizes, in all sorts of patched costumes, with carts and broken-down horses and mules to match.” Because the able-bodied refugees were up front working in the pioneer corps, most of those stranded would have been women, children, and old men.
A number of the refugees, mindful of the fate awaiting them with the rebels, threw themselves into the the 165-feet-wide and 10-feet-deep swollen and icy Ebenezer Creek and drowned. Many were shot by the Confederates, and hundreds were sent back to their owners.
Eventually the matter was leaked to the press, and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton went to Savannah to talk to Sherman, demanding an explanation for what happened at Ebenezer Creek. Sherman urged the Secretary not to jump to conclusions and, in his postwar memoirs, reported that he “explained the matter to [Stanton’s] entire satisfaction.”
Portrait of Edwin Stanton by Matthew Brady
How many women, children, and older men were stranded cannot be determined precisely, but 5,000 is a conservative estimate.
You can read more about the massacre in this Washington Post article.
Filed under: History | Tagged: Black History, Civil War, History |
Legal Legacy 
Historian Lowell P. Wigglesworth has argued convincingly that WT Sherman, the pre and Post Civil War business associate of Gen. Braxton Bragg, was motivated by the New England China Trader and opium merchants , Caleb Cushing, who is referenced in Confederate president Jeff Davis’ letter to Franklin Pierce at Rice University as “like a brother.”
Sherman consolidated the rail head at San Francisco with George C. Bragg. The Civil War stalled the South’s China Trade ambitions of a Savannah to San Diego flatland rail route.
The invention of Dynamite in 1866/7 meant that reconstruction could be abandoned, given that Sherman had destroyed Vicksburg (the logical Mississippi River rail crossing) and Savannah (the eastern terminus of the South’s “Great Snout” of its Atlantic seaboard transportation system that even filibuster William Walker envisioned would beat the North to the Pacific and the Ottoman Empires poppy products which found surgeon Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. titling “anesthetics” and much used in battlefield surgeries by Holmes and Robert E. Lee’s surgeon, the father of sulfur financier, Bernard Baruch.
People will not slaughter 600,000 fellow citizens over poppy greed, so the high minded motive for war was states rights vs. anoliitoon of slavery for the poor and drug running for the New England Brahmans for which Wigglesworth claims both Sherman and Bragg were shills.